The Unforgiven: The Story of Don Revie's Leeds United
Page 22
It was a bitterly deflating end to another season of ‘if onlys’. Milan’s lap of honour was virtually ignored by the Greeks, who considered Revie’s team the real winners. They had good reason. Immediately after the game, UEFA and his own federation suspended Michas, yet United were not offered the replay they deserved and no inquiry followed.
The Italian game has ever been tainted by the stench of corruption, and that May evening in Salonika was certainly not the first or last time that doubt has been cast on a Serie A club’s success. In that very same year, 1973, an honest Portuguese referee, Francisco Marques Lobo, thwarted an attempt to bribe him to bend Derby County’s European Cup semi-final in favour of Juventus. It inspired Brian Glanville and Keith Botsford’s forensic examination of Italian clubs’ corruption of European referees, The Golden Fix. For Don Revie, United’s failure to win anything and the clear signs that his team’s star was on the wane seem to have resolved his dilemma over his future. It was the perfect opportunity to call time on the great Leeds experiment and to get the hell out while he still could.
THIRTEEN
SECOND COMING
In May 1973 Don Revie jetted off to Greece for a family holiday, his future undecided while, back in Leeds, the self-flagellation continued. United just didn’t deserve him. The club’s average league attendance in a season which had seen Leeds finish third and contest two Cup Finals, was under 36,000. Goodison Park had attracted 35,000 a game, despite the fact that Everton had finished seventeenth and been knocked out of the FA Cup in the fourth round. Furthermore, in 1969 when Leeds had won the title, the average gate at Elland Road was 37,000. The following year, when Everton triumphed, the champions had pulled in 49,000. The raw statistics were depressing enough, but an atypically trenchant comment piece in the Yorkshire Evening Post got to the real heart of the matter: ‘The city has carped and cribbed, grumbled about admission charges and generally shown itself quick to criticise and slow to praise. Perhaps thoughts like this are passing through Don Revie’s mind as he basks in sunny Greece. If so, who can blame him?’
The supporters’ gloom was heightened by reports that pools tycoon John Moores had raised the ante. Everton were now said to be offering a £50,000 signing-on fee and an eight-year contract – an astonishing £250,000 before tax. How could anyone – and especially Revie, with his own family to support as well as the elderly relatives he had insisted on moving in with them – possibly turn down that kind of money? Football’s best-known stars were less extravagantly remunerated in 1973, but a ‘present’ of £50,000 needs to be set in context. That very same week the annual conference of the National Union of Mineworkers was calling for members working at the coalface to be paid £2,000 a year.
The outlook appeared bleak for Leeds. Yet two days later at 9 a.m. club secretary Keith Archer received a phone call. It was Don Revie calling from his hotel room, and he informed the bemused Archer that he wanted to stay. Revie’s reasons remained unclear: ‘I have no further comment to make,’ he told the press, ‘and my only wish is that I be allowed to spend the remainder of my holiday in peace.’ One theory suggested that Everton had been pulled up by the Government’s pay and prices board for offering their quarry a £25,000 salary and a tax-free ‘golden hello’ of £50,000. In the early 1970s, a time of acute industrial strife, it was not so simple for an employer to pay an employee his perceived market value. A paragraph in the relevant legislation stated that recruits to existing jobs should not be paid more than the people they replaced.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the Leeds players were understandably delighted. ‘[Don] has built up a family spirit at Elland and no doubt that will continue as before,’ said Billy Bremner. It was now confidently assumed that Revie would finish his managerial career at Leeds, in around 1980. The forty-six-year-old had repeatedly stated that he did not want to continue in management beyond the age of fifty-five. The sighs of relief, however, were premature; the saga was not finished. A week later Revie casually revealed that he had been approached with lucrative offers to take up coaching and managerial jobs in Greece, and announced that in light of these new developments he would be discussing his future with the Leeds board on his return from holiday.
Only a month before, Don Revie had been driving aimlessly around Liverpool trying to find John Moores. Now he was cruising the Aegean on a yacht owned by the president of Olympiakos, Nicos Goulandras. When he got ashore, the president of the Greek Football Association was waiting for him, dangling a bait of £20,000 a year tax-free, plus bonuses, as an inducement to take over the Greek national side. As if that were not enough to conquer the charms of West Yorkshire, Panathinaikos were ready to top the offer, willing to go as high as £28,000 p.a., also tax-free. Leeds’ new chairman, Manny Cussins, was as weary of the affair as the supporters. ‘There’s a Board meeting on Tuesday. Beyond that you know as much as I do,’ he said. That meeting must have been an expensive one, for Revie ended up staying, but the Greek interlude had planted an idea in his mind. A few years later, when Revie’s reign as England manager came to its ignominious end, the prospect of warmer climes and a huge tax-exempt salary would prove too good to turn down.
Most newspapers wrote off Leeds’ title chances for 1973, citing the teams’ failure to beat Sunderland as evidence of their physical decline. Yet, with the exception of Bremner and Giles, most of the key players were still under thirty. Moreover, some of the changes forced on Revie gave his team a little more efficiency and a lot more zap. Sprake, now in the shadow of the less extravagantly gifted but far more reliable Harvey, left for Birmingham, affronted at failing to be awarded a testimonial. Jack Charlton had also gone, though his farewell had been marked by a memorable goodbye clash against Leeds’ European Cup nemesis, Celtic.
Although Revie had offered Charlton a further two-year contract that would have extended his career until the age of forty, Leeds’ longest-serving player left the club in the summer of 1973 to become manager of Middlesborough. He had arrived for his job interview there armed with a list of demands provided by Revie – a kind of crib-sheet on how to run a club – and, typically unorthodox, turned the tables to grill his bemused interviewers. Charlton read out his terms and gave the panel ten minutes to ‘take them or leave them’ before they could even ask him any questions – but he was offered the position all the same. He made a great start in his new profession, winning promotion at his first attempt, and subsequently started Sheffield Wednesday’s revival after more than a decade’s decline before his well-chronicled success with the Republic of Ireland national side. The only mystery of Charlton’s managerial career is why he was never offered the chance to save Leeds during the club’s long decline when he had a far better track record than anyone else. It seems that the Leeds Board were apprehensive about just how much freedom he would have demanded. List or no list, it’s doubtful that they would have willingly surrendered total control a second time.
Gordon McQueen was primed to step into Charlton’s shoes; his best mate, Joe Jordan was also fast maturing and would provide top-class cover in attack. Otherwise it was a case of ‘as you were’ – there were to be no forays into the transfer market, despite funds being available. Revie gave a testy reply when quizzed once again about his conservatism. ‘I am well aware there’s been a lot of talk about the team breaking up,’ he said. ‘But what people have forgotten is that we have introduced a number of younger players in the last few years – Jordan, McQueen, Frank Gray, Cherry, Bates and Gary Liddell. These are young players who will only get better as time goes on.’ Hindsight shows that Revie was broadly correct, but even Leeds fans will raise a quizzical eyebrow at the name of Gary ‘who he?’ Liddell. Teenage fullback Peter Hampton, an England youth player, would also break through into the first-team squad – but this youngster was no Terry Cooper.
Revie’s puzzling failure to replenish his squad is partly explained by the dim view he took of the raw talent brought to his attention. ‘The standard of youngsters coming into English socc
er has dropped alarmingly in recent years,’ he lamented. ‘One of the reasons [is] the type of coaching lads get at schoolboy level. I appreciate that many teachers give up a lot of their spare time to the game without extra payment. But it would help enormously if ALL concentrated a bit more on developing the basic skills of their lads, instead of making them conform to 4–4–2 or 4–3–3 systems.’ He added: ‘It’s staggering the number of hours we at Leeds have to spend teaching junior players the fundamentals of the game … kicking, dribbling and passing, etc. Not so long ago, it was rare to come across any lad who needed intensive coaching in these skills.’ Revie’s observation that English players were falling behind their continental counterparts in technical ability would be borne out in future years. He blamed the Football Association for banning players from being paid for their coaching services. ‘If Billy Bremner went into a school in Leeds and asked boys to practise ball control, I’m sure they would do it,’ he observed. Here he was being a bit too mercenary on his players’ behalf. The FA expected players to hone their coaching prowess in the schools for free, to show their commitment as both Revie and Jack Charlton had done. Called ‘putting something back’, it was something very few professionals objected to.
Revie’s options were, of course, already circumscribed by his insistence that newcomers conform to the club’s notoriously insular and defiantly unsophisticated culture. In the freewheeling 1970s such players were becoming harder to find. Revie’s explanation to the gifted Scot ‘Slim’ Jim Baxter on why he would not be signing him is a good example. ‘I’m told you drink everything that is brewed and distilled up here, that there aren’t enough girls for you to chase, and that you’re not averse to the odd brawl.’ An unfazed Baxter sighed, before replying, ‘You’re remarkably well-informed.’
Having decided to stay at Leeds, Revie was determined to atone for the embarrassment of the previous season. He could now admit the extent of his disappointment at losing to Sunderland. ‘It only really hit me at the post-match banquet,’ he said. ‘As our guests were leaving, I slumped into my chair and cried like a child.’ The scale of Revie’s ambition in what was to be his final season only became clear at the team talk preceding the opening league match. In Sniffer, his latest autobiography, Allan Clarke recalls the gauntlet thrown down by Revie before his bemused team: ‘The gaffer said, “Right lads, we’ve been the best team for the last decade. I know we haven’t won as much as we should have, but that’s in the past. Now I’ve had a thought in the close season – can we go through the whole campaign unbeaten?” We all looked at each other in silence and then, after a while we said. … “Yes it’s possible.” It was certainly a different pep talk to most seasons. Of course you start off aiming to win all your games, but to actually set it as a target – this was different.’
As ever, Revie not only wanted to win, he also wanted to be lauded for winning. In early 1972 the nation had been forced to acknowledge his players’ brilliance as they adopted a more expansive brand of football, but the season just past had seen a deterioration in discipline. Norman Hunter and Trevor Cherry were the worst offenders, each collecting eight bookings by March. After two years’ grace from the press, ‘Dirty Leeds’ had been reborn in style. At the season’s end the Football Association slapped a suspended £3,000 fine on Leeds, again warning the club to put its house in order. Revie responded with a charm offensive, calling a press conference at which he promised an improvement in the players’ behaviour. The club had also appointed its own spin-doctor to woo its detractors, a man in his twenties called Peter Fay. For home games the practice of kicking cheap plastic footballs into the crowd would continue.
Some of Revie’s critics would never be convinced. A 1974 issue of the groundbreakingly tongue-in-cheek Foul magazine praised Leeds for their ‘high-level chess’ and ‘intellectual sophistication’. If Revie had stopped reading there, he would have been elated, but author Peter Ball had more to say. ‘Away from home, Leeds display as much sense of adventure as the average Women’s Institute. They can still clog with the best. Norman “Bites yer Legs” Hunter is the main culprit, [but] Bremner and Giles both contribute mightily to the cause on occasions.’ The article was titled ‘Leeds, the Ultimate Defence’. Once again, Revie had been damned by faint praise.
To say that Leeds still lacked adventure is a view not borne out by the facts. In each of the previous three seasons Leeds had been among the two highest scoring sides in the First Division, and in one of those seasons were top. In 1972/73 only champions Liverpool, who finished with 72, bettered their total of 71 league goals. The two other clubs involved in the title shake-up, Arsenal and Ipswich Town, had finished up in the mid-50s. The new season would see Revie loosen the shackles still further. Training sessions now emphasized shooting practice; his players were instructed to let fly within sight of goal. His captain, who had always had an eye for goal, would play further upfield, driving into the penalty area to support the strikers. The tactic worked – Billy Bremner would score four in the first four games.
It must almost have seemed as if Revie, the arch-pragmatist, had undergone some sort of Damascene conversion. But the man’s craving for success would never be subordinated to the desire to entertain and impress. What had happened was that just days after their humbling by Sunderland, Leeds had signed off the previous season with a 6–1 drubbing of Arsenal at Elland Road. Though only 25,000 turned up to see it, it was one of the most significant results of Revie’s reign. ‘It is impossible to minimize the effect which that result had on the Leeds players,’ he commented. ‘I look upon it as one of the most important wins this club has achieved since I became manager.’ If a policy of all-out attack could wreak such havoc, he reasoned, perhaps he should relax a bit more and trust his players to deliver. This new offensive mindset was trialled in a close season practice match behind closed doors. Bradford Park Avenue were swept aside 5–0, with Mick Jones grabbing a hat-trick. The die was cast.
In the early weeks of the season Leeds would play some of the most fluid, precise and penetrative football the First Division had ever seen. Nineteen goals were scored in seven successive victories, leaving the press purring. John Arlott, more famous as the lyrical chronicler of a different sport, cricket, joined in the plaudits. In the wake of Leeds’ seventh win, a 2–1 defeat of Southampton, he wrote in the Guardian: ‘Wearing the white strip of a blameless life, Leeds moved in a ceaseless flow, back in packed in defence, competing for the midfield, sweeping forward with backs overlapping. Yet it was all so controlled, almost amiable … so free from the aura of violence they used to generate.’
The run began with a 3–1 win over Everton, with Leeds virtually at full strength. Eddie Gray had returned to the team after missing most of the previous season. However, it was two early victories in North London that really caught the eye. The capital, where his team were most reviled, had not been a happy hunting ground for Revie in recent years. His team had not won there in the league for two and a half years – they had not beaten Arsenal at Highbury since 1969. The game against Arsenal on 28 August was also expected to test Revie’s commitment to good conduct. The opening game had passed by without a hint of a booking or stern lecture for either side, but clashes with the Gunners were always fraught affairs. In the corresponding fixture the previous season the referee assigned to the fixture, the Welsh martinet Clive Thomas, had booked six players – five of them from Leeds.
Arsenal came into the match brimful of confidence following a 3–0 drubbing of Manchester United on the opening day, and went in front after just 90 seconds. For half an hour, it seemed that Revie’s hopes of a season without defeat were to be dashed at a humiliatingly early stage. Arsenal besieged the Leeds penalty area and a second goal seemed inevitable. In the second half, however, the midfield duo of Giles and Bremner, together with a rejuvenated Eddie Gray, took a stranglehold on the midfield. Arsenal, fluid, swift and sure of themselves in the first period, were suddenly run ragged. On 50 minutes Peter Lorimer unleashed a 30-
yard thunderbolt, which left Bob Wilson clutching at the air as it ripped into the net. The balance of power had shifted. Six minutes later a Paul Madeley strike put United in front after a sweeping move begun by Clarke in his own half, which then involved Giles and Gray. For the rest of the match Leeds assumed a dominance of Arsenal they had rarely, if ever, enjoyed at Highbury.
The thin-skinned Revie was overjoyed, not only with the victory, but also with the muted appreciation of the home fans. ‘Hearing the London supporters applaud us for our second-half football was like music in my ears,’ he exulted. ‘I have been saying for years we have players in our side with world-class footballing skills. People have refused to believe me.’ At Tottenham four days later, ripples of spontaneous applause could again be heard as the home crowd marvelled at Leeds’ speed of thought and movement. Billy Bremner scored twice in the first 14 minutes, Allan Clarke adding a third before the half-hour. As a contest, the match was over soon after it had begun.
For the second time in five days Revie’s team had achieved a notable feat: winning rare praise from two sets of hitherto hostile supporters while displaying exemplary behaviour on the field. The manager revelled in his fleeting popularity. Even the referee, Roger Kirkpatrick, had buttonholed him in a White Hart Lane corridor to pass on his compliments. ‘He told me it had been a pleasure to be on the same field as Leeds United,’ Revie boasted. ‘Mr Kirkpatrick also said that he had never had any trouble with us but wanted to point out that he thought my players had been the model of good behaviour and were a credit to the game.’ Hamming it up, Revie claimed to be so impressed that he asked Kirkpatrick to repeat his little homily to the players. The official obliged, adding, ‘I had to say something. If this is what Leeds intend to do in every game, on behalf of my fellow referees I had to say thank you in advance. I wish all matches were played in the same spirit.’